There are dozens of empty rooms near 16th and Mission. Why can’t the city use them to house people?

In the housing eco-system around 16th and Mission Streets, single room occupancy hotels show both the promise of empty rooms and the confounding obstacles that keep rooms out of reach for homeless residents. 

Take the west side of Mission Street between 17th and 16th streets, where six SROs, most built more than a century ago, are situated. 

In total, they offer 163 rooms, but over 50 percent of the rooms in half of these hotels have been reported empty for years. Three of the hotels — The Westman Hotel at 2056 Mission St., the Union Hotel at 2030 Mission St. and the Frances Hotel at 2084 Mission St. — have reported vacancy rates of more than 50 percent during the past two years, according to the annual usage reports the hotels submitted to the Department of Building Inspection. 

The Westman and Union have reported such rates since 2020.

It would seem an easy fix to fill the rooms up, but city officials and housing advocates say a number of challenges prevent that from happening. From the city’s perspective: building size, access to private bathrooms, working elevators and a lack of funds. For hoteliers, the fear of attracting ‘problematic’ tenants, no real desire to have city inspectors too close and the cost of rehabilitating the units.  

When asked why the city hasn’t taken advantage of the vacancies in privately run SROs, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing said in a statement, “While the structure of each agreement may vary, our priorities remain consistent: ensuring that permanent supportive housing provides a healthy, dignified living environment for tenants, with features such as private bathrooms, elevators, community space, on-site case management, and access to public transportation.” 

These are challenges not only for the SROs at 16th and Mission, but likely obstacles for many of the city’s 378 privately run SROs. 

Those factors, industry insiders said, have kept many vacant rooms from becoming part of the city’s master leasing program, which primarily supplies permanent supportive housing. Currently, the city master-leases 46 single room occupancy hotels across the city, totaling 3,648 permanent supportive housing units, according to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. 

The city master leases eight buildings while the remaining 38 are master leased through nonprofits using funds from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

While the city now seems to prefer SROs with private bathrooms, many of the SROs it leases or helps master lease are without that feature. 

Out of the 46 buildings, 10 have private bathrooms, 13 have shared bathrooms and 23 have a mix of shared and private facilities. 

Randy Shaw, the executive director at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, runs four buildings in the Mission through the Master Lease Program. Only one, the Royan Hotel at 405 Valencia St. has some units with private bathrooms – 38 in the 66-unit building.

However, Shaw said that the city is currently showing less interest in buildings with units that share bathrooms. 

Maybe it shouldn’t be, some suggest. 

Dr. Margot Kushel, the director at the University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, said that permanent supportive housing in single room occupancy hotels, even if these buildings are not in pristine condition, plays an important role in the city’s efforts to house people. 

She understands that the cost of providing services in permanent housing can outstrip available financing, she says, and that not every SRO will have all the features the city considers ideal. But Kushel says that SROs are still key for preventing homelessness, and helping people recover from life on the streets. 

“There’s no question that as flawed as it is, as imperfect as it is…having a place to call their own, and having the rights and responsibilities of tenancy, has been really transformational for a lot of people,” said Kushel.

Still the city appears to have no immediate plans to master lease new hotels. 

Under the Lurie administration, the city received funds for the acquisition and rehabilitation of 1035 Van Ness Ave., a 124-unit permanent supportive housing complex near the Tenderloin, and for the rehabilitation of 835 Turk St., a 112-unit supportive housing complex near Hayes Valley, previously acquired in 2022.

Most of the buildings the city acquired since the pandemic have private bathrooms.

As for master leases, no new agreements have been made since Mayor Lurie took office –  only two, one-year renewals in the Tenderloin: The Monarch Hotel at 1015 Geary St., a 96-unit building, and the Adante Hotel at 610 Geary St., a 85-unit building.

Sam Devdhara, a local hotelier and administrator with decades of experience in the hotel and SRO business, is currently rehabilitating the single room occupancy hotel at 3032 16th St. after a fire destroyed most of the building in 2022.

This renovated building will have private bathrooms, and Devdhara hopes the city will have interest in master-leasing it.  

The city has acquired or master-leased properties in the area before. In 1997, it partially financed the acquisition of the Altamont Hotel at 3048 16th St., at Julian Avenue, a permanent supportive housing complex managed by Mission Housing. In 2022, the city acquired the former Eula Hotel from Devdhara, across from the Altamont, and turned it into 25-unit permanent supportive housing for youth, with private bathrooms.

But there’s been little activity in the Mission since.

Sam Dodge, who served as the transitional director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing for four months in 2021, explained the slow pace by saying that the city usually is looking to lease buildings with dozens of units. In contrast, the Westman Hotel has 22 rooms, the Union Hotel has 37 rooms and the Frances Hotel has 50 rooms.

Dodge also doubled down on the importance of private bathrooms and reliable elevators as major factors the city considers.

“Old elevators are kind of a liability. The people that we’re trying to house have a lot of disabilities and are older,” said Dodge. “But private baths, oh, boy, that’s very popular.”

This reporter visited five out of the six single room occupancy hotels on Mission street between 16th and 17th street. While most of these were fairly clean, none had private bathrooms or elevators.

Vinay Patel, owner of the Union Hotel, pointed out that adding bathrooms would also diminish the number of rooms. He estimated that the Union, with 37 rooms, would end up with only half that number. 

Private bathrooms aside, there are other reasons as well. Dodge said that in many cases hotel owners don’t want to enter master-leasing agreements with the city. For the most part, the city leaves private owners alone, aside from paying a yearly visit for inspection and requiring the hoteliers to submit an annual usage report.

“When the city’s up in your business every day, you’re going to have a lot of inspectors. You’re going to have a lot of people crawling all over it,” said Dodge. “A lot of owners don’t want all that.”

Whitney Jones, the deputy chief of community real estate at Chinatown Community Development Center, agreed. He said that in his 34 years at the nonprofit he’s seen many single room occupancy hotels near Chinatown with high vacancy rates because owners simply chose to keep them empty.

Many of these buildings are already paid off,  he said, and owners don’t feel an incentive to lease all the units to the city for supportive housing, preferring instead to rent commercial units on the first floor. Jones pointed to owners’ worries about making improvements to infrastructure, hiring  24-hour front-desk employees, and the constant fear of attracting problematic tenants. 

Three owners, plus a person representing the ownership of one of the buildings on the block, said they’d be willing to sit down with the city to talk about master leasing scenarios.

Albert Tam, co-owner of the residential complex at 2044-2046 Mission St. and the Radna Hotel at 2040-2042 Mission St., said he’s putting the properties on the market after nearly 20 years of ownership. Tam said street conditions and a desire to retire have prompted him to make this decision.

Tam said that he’s open to talking with city officials or a nonprofit if there’s interest in master leasing, or buying the two properties for $5 million. As an alternative, Tam said he’s exploring the possibility of building an eight-story building featuring 42 studios with private bathrooms. 

The owner of the Krishna Hotel and the manager of the trust of another SRO on the block also said they would be open to selling to the city.